Valve was even more different from Sargus in every way that mattered. Each commander seemed to have their own characteristic and presence.
Where Sargus pressed, Valve read. Where Sargus committed with aggression because it had always been enough, Valve moved with discipline.
His Edgeform was mastered, not proficient. Every swing contained the answer to the swing before it.
Alistair's Rune Sword met the shortsword, and the impact told him everything he needed to know.
'This one is better.'
Valve's footwork was precise. He shifted between stances without any gap between them, his positioning adjusting to Alistair's movement as if he already knew what was coming.
The shortsword redirected rather than blocked, turning Alistair's force back on itself with angles that left him correcting his balance after every exchange.
Alistair stepped back. Valve followed immediately.
The Edgeform mastery showed in the transitions.
Every position flowed into the next without hesitation, the kind of discipline that came from years of drilling the same sequences until the body forgot how to do them wrong.
Sargus had relied on speed and aggression to overwhelm opponents. Valve didn't need either. He simply didn't leave openings.
Fortunately, the partial recovery Due had given him was still holding. His arms responded when he needed them to. His footwork was clean enough.
However, the morning's accumulated cost was arriving. Not as a collapse, but as a gradual thinning. Reactions that should have been immediate took an extra fraction of a second.
Adjustments that the Equalizer normally handled automatically required conscious effort now, the miscalibrated scan forcing him to correct every reading manually.
The ceiling was getting close. Valve's discipline was the kind that found ceilings and pressed against them until something gave.
Valve didn't speak during the fight.
His face showed nothing except focus. The gauntness of his features was more visible up close, the sharpness of someone who hadn't been eating properly.
Alistair could see the resemblance to Sargus in the jaw and the brow, but where Sargus had been aggressive even in how he stood, Valve carried himself with the restraint of a man who measured everything before spending it.
Alistair clicked his tongue and adjusted again. Equalizer matching the Edgeform's rhythm now, trying to predict which stance Valve would flow into next.
The problem was that Valve didn't have patterns. Sargus had three moves he cycled through under pressure.
Valve had none. Every response was chosen in the moment, selected from a mastery deep enough that he could pick the right answer faster than Alistair could generate the question.
'He's not going to make a mistake,' Alistair thought.
The frustration was immediate. Three minutes in, and his options were narrowing.
The Equalizer's ceiling pressed closer with each exchange. The morning's exhaustion crept into his awareness, reminding him that he had fought Sargus, fought Ace, fought through a thousand soldiers since dawn.
Due's partial recovery had bought him time, not stamina.
There was only one remaining option.
Alistair took a breath. Then another. He felt the Equalizer straining against its limit, felt the ceiling that had been approaching all morning finally arriving.
"Open: Convergent Domain Mode."
The world changed.
Once again, his grey world was colored. It hit him suddenly, the morning sky real and layered with blues and whites and the thin orange of dawn at the eastern edge.
The ground was brown and red with blood, the grass green where it hadn't been torn up. Valve's shortsword gleamed silver against all of it.
Due was somewhere behind him. Far back and alive, the bind confirming it with a clarity that the grey world never gave.
Elara was further back than she'd been told to stay and closer than she was supposed to be, her signature warm and distinct at the territory's edge.
Alistair looked at Valve across the colored world.
Seeing this, Valve's eyes widened. Not at the colors. At what was happening to the air between them.
"Inverted," muttered Alistair.
The first use matched the full army simultaneously, matching Alistair's output to a thousand soldiers at once.
This was different. This pushed equalized power outward; the Equalizer no longer matched opponents but asserted itself against the space around him. Gravity decided to work sideways.
Valve was caught in it.
His Edgeform couldn't help him. No stance in any discipline accounted for the ground abandoning its relationship with his feet.
He went sideways with the force of it, his shortsword still in his grip, his body moving in a direction that had nothing to do with combat positioning.
The formation behind him fragmented as the outward push expanded, soldiers thrown from their positions.
Alistair felt the cost the moment it started.
It was larger than the first use, much larger. The mode burned through reserves he didn't have, pulling from somewhere deeper than stamina.
Something that felt more permanent than exhaustion. He held it for four seconds, then five.
Then it ended.
Color went, and grey came back heavier than before.
The sky flattened into the same featureless thing he'd been living under for as long as he could remember.
The ground lost its texture. The battlefield took on the same dark shade as everything else.
And within the grey, something was slightly wrong.
Alistair reached for a reading out of habit. The scan returned something different from what he expected.
Not dramatically different, just enough to notice. The Equalizer's output had shifted, its calibration off by an amount that was small enough to fight through and large enough to feel every time he used it.
His eyes widened.
'Permanent.'
The word sat in him without comfort. The miscalibration from the first use was now deeper, more persistent.
It was in every passive scan and every active reading, every fight and every quiet moment where the Equalizer ran in the background. He would always adjust now.
He would always be slightly wrong, and he would always have to correct for it.
Alistair was quiet for a moment. The realization sat heavily in him.
Valve was on the ground twenty meters away, the shortsword still in his grip.
The formation behind him was scattered, soldiers picking themselves up with the confusion of people who didn't understand what had just happened.
Alistair watched Valve's reading on the scan. It flickered, then stabilized.
Sovereign Debt activated.
Alistair furrowed his brows. He felt it happen, the distant signature of Caldren's Characteristic reaching across whatever distance separated them.
The cost of it was invisible from here. However, the result was clear.
Caldren considered Valve worth the cost. Sargus, he had let die.
Hearing the silence from the field, Alistair saw Valve come back from wherever he had fallen. He realized the difference clearly: Sargus was expendable, but Valve was not.
Valve rose slowly. He got to his feet with the deliberate care of someone who was alive because someone else had decided he should be, and the weight of that showed in how he moved. He looked at Alistair from across the distance.
Something in his expression that Alistair couldn't name was neither rage nor the grief from before. It was something that sat between the two and had yet to be decided.
Alistair held his gaze.
Valve turned and walked back toward the retreating formation without looking back.
'Is that how all Commanders of Therasia work? By retreating? How pathetic.'
He stood alone in the field, grey world, and miscalibrated Equalizer, and the morning fully arrived around him.
One reading remained in the distance. Not in the retreating formation, but further out toward the east, in the crater that Due's detonation had left.
Green Rune Armor, visible from the high ground. Viridius, moving through the crater, not searching but working.